Father of the Bride (1950)
Stanley Banks’ obligation to plan his daughter’s wedding is ruining his life.
(For a quick primer on what this blog is, click here.)
When I am asked about the scariest horror movie I’ve ever seen, I typically respond with Still Alice (2014), a movie about a woman with early onset Alzheimer's disease. It’s because “horror” isn’t just jump scares and viscera; instead, it can be a slow-motion car crash based on the frailties of our shared humanity. Father of the Bride is one of those car crash movies. Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy), a successful lawyer, loving husband, and doting father, discovers that his darling daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) is engaged. His trip through the Wedding Industrial Complex mirrors Dante’s descent through the circles of Hell.
The movie turns Stanley’s anxieties real in a famous nightmare scene inspired by Salvador Dalí. In his dream (which is set to a spooky minor-key rendition of Wagner’s “Wedding Chorus”), the church aisle is quicksand, giant eyes watch him, and his clothes are ripped off amid silent screaming. When the wedding goes off without a hitch, then, it’s surprising that the movie doesn’t ask if the pain endured was worth it. Can planning a wedding be anything other than a soul-crushing, wallet-annihilating experience? Or is it simply one of those human trials we must endure, immutable and unkillable? Spooky indeed.
Rating: 7/10, a comedy infused with a deep strain of existential dread.
Cast and Crew
This one’s got some big names in it. Let’s start with Spencer Tracy. He is tied with Laurence Olivier with nine (!) nominations for Best Actor. Tracy’s first three nominations, achieved in consecutive years for San Francisco, Captains Courageous, and Boys Town, all predate this film. (Those were from 1936 through 1938; he won for the latter two. We’ll get to Tom Hanks also pulling off back-to-back wins in 60 years.) 1942’s Woman of the Year saw the first of Tracy’s nine movies with Katharine Hepburn, and 1949 had one of their most famous: Adam’s Rib, about married lawyers facing off in court. We’ll catch up with Spencer Tracy in 1955.
Elizabeth Taylor is a Hollywood icon, most famous (to me, at least) for being the voice of Maggie Simpson. She gets her start as a child star in the title role in the Mickey Rooney 1944 film National Velvet.1 In crossword puzzle answer James Agee’s review of that film, he wrote “I think that she and the picture are wonderful, and I hardly know or care whether she can act or not.” Taylor doesn’t get a lot to do in Father of the Bride except smolder when looking into her husband-to-be’s eyes, but she’s pretty good at the smoldering.2 There will be plenty more Elizabeth Taylor in this column and we’ll use that time to try and uncover whether or not she can act. (Spoiler: she can.)
By 1950, director Vincente Minnelli had already helmed the classic Meet me in St. Louis (1944) and married Judy Garland (he and Garland are the parents of Liza Minnelli). His other classics—An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958), both which won Best Picture—didn’t receive Best Actor noms, but he’ll be back in this column soon enough.
Billie Burke, who played the mother of the groom, played Glinda the Good Witch in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. She was famously married to Florenz Ziegfeld, the eponymous Ziegfeld of the theatrical revues “Ziegfeld Follies” (modeled on the Folies Bergère) and the subject of the 1936 Best Picture winner The Great Ziegfeld.
A sequel to Father of the Bride called Father’s Little Dividend came out ten months after the original. These two movies were remade with Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Diane Keaton in 1991 and 1995 as Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride, Part II. I haven’t seen either and don’t plan to (Martin Short isn’t my cup of tea) but I think I got the picture from this recent SNL skit. There’s also a 2020 pandemic sequel with the characters in zoom boxes called Father of the Bride, Part Three(ish); it adds Florence Pugh, Ben Platt, and Robert DeNiro to the cast. It has the line, “dad, you’re comparing my wedding to the pandemic?” so it’s obviously great.
The trivia
Stanley mentions that the bridesmaids’ dresses should remind you of “the girl on the white rock bottle.” That “girl” is actually the Greek goddess Psyche.3
Psyche, the goddess of the soul, has a name that means "soul" and "butterfly" in Greek, and in the picture, you can see she has butterfly wings. The story of Psyche and Cupid, in which the mortal Psyche endures many trials to be with Cupid, is trivia catnip. Poet John Keats, famed for mawkish odes, wrote the first of his 1819 odes about Psyche (others from that year include “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”).4
Stanley brags about still fitting into his old “cutaway” in the photo below:
A cutaway is like a tuxedo for daytime formal events. The cutaway’s jacket is longer than the jacket for a tuxedo and is “cut away” in the front, creating a sloping line from the waist to the front edges. There are other more subtle differences between the two garments, but the differences in silhouette and use should be enough to distinguish them.
Two classic wedding songs are heard during Kay’s wedding ceremony. The first, which plays during the walk down the aisle, is the “Wedding Chorus” from Wagner’s 1850 opera Lohengrin. It’s the “here comes the bride” song, though the actual lyrics, which are German, are more….vigorous. At the recessional, they play Felix Mendelssohn's 1848 “Wedding March” from his suite of incidental music to Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. This one fits a wedding a bit better than “Wedding Chorus,” since “AMND” has a happy ending and “Lohengrin,” in classic opera fashion, totally doesn’t.
Odds and Ends
Stanley asks his daughter if she wants a “short snort” before the wedding; this does not allude to cocaine, as you would be forgiven for thinking, but instead a quick drink of liquor (“snort” being slang for a mixed drink and “short” meaning less than the full drink). Unrelated: a short snort is also a bill signed by the people who have made a voyage together; this Wikipedia page about it is pretty neat.
National Velvet: like the Frank Stockton story, you must ask yourself if “Velvet” is the lady, or the horse—or, worse, is the National Velvet the competition they’re training for? Never fear: the movie is named for Taylor’s character Velvet, whose horse’s name is The Piebald, and together they’re training for the Grand National Steeplechase.
Though one thing she did do was turn her 1950 marriage to Conrad Hilton Jr. into publicity for the flick. Husband #1 is on the board!
Note that Psyche is topless on the White Rock bottle, meaning Tracy’s character was presumably making a joke about having the dresses bare the bridesmaids’ breasts. The joke falls a bit flat nowadays, not because it’s not funny, but because no one’s seen a White Rock bottle since, like, prohibition.
Though watch out! Keats didn’t have a monopoly on saccharine Romantic odes—Shelley was the author of “Ode to the West Wind.”